Estella's Diary: Friends and Family, We Had a Jim Dandy Time (Volume II‪)‬

It’s the fall of 1915. Volume II, Estella’s Diary: Friends and Family, We had a Jim Dandy Time begins on September 1, 1915. Estella celebrated a birthday in August and is now twenty-two years old and enjoying life to the fullest.
Using Estella’s authentic diary entries, family stories, and actual historical events, each chapter covers a single day in Estella’s life.
After a summer of church picnics, carefree dates, and a glorious vacation with eight young women at a lakeside cottage, Estella has decided she must get a job. Most of her friends are working and she wants to join the working crowd. On September 2nd, her first day of job hunting, she gets a job at Roller-Smith Manufacturing. Working in a factory is a brand new experience and she soon finds out factory work is not exactly what she had in mind when she decided to go to work.
She is still going out occasionally with her father’s cousin, Walter, but continues to tell him they are “just friends” and that’s the way it has to be. George Eck, another admirer, has finally convinced Estella to go out on a date. And, Dan, her secret Irish Catholic beau is still dancing with Estella when they meet at the Bethlehem Dance Academy.
It is an exciting time. The Suffragettes are making speeches, South Bethlehem is celebrating its 50th Anniversary, and the Greater Allentown Fair has come to the area.
Estella’s Diary takes you on a journey through the end of the “Golden Years” of the early 1900’s. Capturing this transformative period through richly drawn characters, you’ll come to know and care deeply for Estella, her family and her friends. Reading Estella’s actual diary entries will take you back to a time when automobiles, telephones and electric appliances were new inventions that would change their world.
Sunday’s are celebrated with a church service, a hearty dinner and relaxing after a week of hard work. The Harwi family is no exception. Join the family on a beautiful Sunday in September as they gather along the bubbling Saucon Creek after a hearty chicken dinner. Estella’s father and mother, Robert and Hattie are resting on deep Adirondack chairs, their eldest daughter, Pluma, twenty-four and her husband, Ollie, have come to visit. Ollie is fast asleep in the hammock. Pluma and Estella, are sitting under a willow tree gossiping. Ethel, at twelve, Minnie, three years younger and Robby, just six are trying to catch minnows with tin cups. The fun begins when Walter, Robert’s cousin and one of Estella’s beaus, drives up in his Buick. Estella is expecting George Eck but not Walter. George arrives just fifteen minutes later and neither young man is happy to see their competition.
This is the second part of a 3-volume trilogy -- a diary filled with a young woman’s secret thoughts that will span seven months of her life in 1915. Included are favorite activities of the day including church picnics, popular parlor games, lyrics to the hit tunes they sang and danced to, as well as the proper way to pick potatoes and husk corn. Volume II, Estella’s Diary: Friends and Family, We had a Jim Dandy Time, covers September and October, the glorious days of autumn in 1915.
The author, Gwen Pierce-Jones, is Estella’s niece. She found Estella’s Diary, wrapped in an old silk handkerchief, in a bedroom dresser drawer as she was cleaning Estella’s home after the family moved her from Coral Gables, Florida to a nursing home in “Good Old Bethlehem.” Estella passed away at the age of ninety-four in 1987.